French language thread dies at midnight gmt

["Wes Kussmaul" <wes@village.com>]

> > >  For now, English is the lingua franca of
> > > the world.
> >
> > What a telling expression that is. It's Latin for "the French language",
> > which displaced Latin some centuries ago as the accepted worldwide
language
> > of commerce and diplomacy.
>
> I beg to differ.  Lingua Franca is not French at all, it's a separate
> language, now dead.

Very interesting, I stand corrected. At least partially.

However, "Lingua Franca" does translate to "Language of the Franks," and
while "the Franks" and modern France are not identical, Language of the
Franks pretty much means French.

Anyway, the point  is that before the various technology revolutions swept
English in as the universal language of commerce, the French language was,
as your Included Stuff notes, "triumphant"...

>   and surviving until the nineteenth century, when it
>   disappeared with hardly a trace, probably under the
>   onslaught of the triumphant French language,

... as in, if you did business internationally, or if you were involved in
any kind of international diplomacy, or if you hung out with the in crowd
that preceded the jet set, you spoke French.

The reason this way off topic discussion has any relevance at all is this:
when you get to know the French a little, and read a little past the
stereotypes, the root of it seems plain to me: it's all about language.
Their language used to be _the_ language, the one the important people
spoke, the one the cool people spoke, the language used in scholarly papers.
Now it's English.

People often express the dread of losing a war as, "We'll all be speaking
______ [language of the victor]." Language reaches really deep into the
psyche. I find it helps to consider that when communicating with the French.
If you're a native English speaker, keep in mind that you just won the big
game, and they lost. It helps to be gracious in those circumstances.

That's the last from me in this thread, I promise.

Wes Kussmaul